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What's next for journalism?

I have spent my whole life in the world of journalism, and this industry is at a crossroads. In the United States the number of reporters on the ground has declined by as much as 30 percent over the past decade. For an array of reasons, we’ve seen a huge loss of everyday local news sources including newspapers and radio stations. But at the same time, in local areas and on specialized digital platforms, new generations of passionate communicators are stepping up to cover that gap. This project is for them and others who aren’t heading to journalism school anytime soon — but whose grassroots voices often bring a priceless wealth of knowledge to any community.

We need to find more ways to build better journalists, and this project aims to help do that. Here we’ll have a pocket journalism school covering the basics of news gathering and dissemination, with tips on technique and ethics. In fact we’ll try to crowdsource some Citizen Journalism House Rules, to put down a baseline of best practices for independent journalists who have jumped bravely into the deep end of the blogosphere, where there are no lifeguards.

This is ‘independent journalism’ arising from ‘citizen journalism.’ Because there must be a different way of growing our reporting community than relying solely on a handful of colleges and universities to cultivate all these new voices.